New York nurses ask the authorities for urgent help against the coronavirus: “We are dying”

“We are outraged. They did not give us adequate protection. Many of us have fallen ill and some have died ”. With these heartbreaking lamentations, nurses from the Jacobi Medical Center in The Bronx, one of the areas most affected by the coronavirus in New York, staged a protest this Friday in which they asked for “respect” from the health authorities.

Behind the walls of a hospital, no matter where, nurses and doctors battle against the clock, they move from one side to another like ants, almost without respite, much less without sleep, in their fight to prevent the COVID pandemic -19 take another life.

Today, these nurses stopped to raise their voices and denounce a change in the policy of the administration of public hospitals in the city of not paying their salary if they do not present a medical certificate if they are absent due to illness, even for one day.

“It is outrageous”, “cruel”, “an insult” to a staff that works hard to care for each patient, They complained during a demonstration in front of the hospital where they work in this county with a Latino majority and that adds to other complaints about the lack of equipment to protect their lives, and having had to refuse contaminated masks.

“We also get sick”

Much of the equipment they have now has come to them through donations, said the nurses who carried signs with messages of “we are not robots, we also get sick”, “respect” or “patients above profits”, and that they had expressions of support from the public who honked their horns and encouraged them from their vehicles.

“Before you needed a letter from the doctor if it was more than three days now, for whatever reason you need a letter for up to one day. They are also not wanting to pay if you use your sick days, “he told EFE Kelly Cabrera, who was born in New York, the daughter of Ecuadorian immigrants.

“How, during a pandemic in which we are working as hard as we can, in which many of our workers have gotten sick and died, this city is now committing this injustice,” says the 28-year-old nurse, who works in the ward. The Jacobi emergency room, one of eleven health centers of the public hospital corporation, where patients continue to arrive, mostly Latino and black, as statistics have revealed.

There, behind the walls of that hospital, together with other nurses and doctors battle against COVID-19, which has already claimed more than 11,000 lives in New York.

That place, he says, it’s like a “war field”, in which there are days when there are not so many patients but in others it is crowded.

“My soul breaks”

“I have not seen my parents in more than a month, and luckily it is only my husband and I, I do not have children, I do not have that fear (of them being infected), but my colleagues who have children and in All this time they have not been able to see them, they have not been able to hug them. They do not see their children, their parents, because they do not infect them, “says Cabrera, leader of the New York Nurses Association at this hospital.

Like everyone, she also fears contagion and says she will undergo the test next week after a doctor close to her and other colleagues tested positive for the virus.

“I am afraid that when all this is over people will not learn from what we are living, that everything will return as before, that people will not take care of themselves”, points out.

“We are all afraid”

Judy Sheridan González is also a nurse in an emergency room at one of the major hospitals in the Bronx, where she says 5,000 healthcare workers have been infected, including her, who is now waiting to undergo the antibody test that will determine when she will be able to return to work.

“Many are sick, others have died, there is a lot of stress, a lot of problems and in the end they are punished (with the new policy). Everyone has COVID “says the also president of the New York Nurses Association, who did not want to give figures.

“Everyone is afraid. When you cough, you are afraid; when you have a fever, you are afraid, nobody knows what will happen, but we continue working,” he says.

After the demonstration, the nurses adjust their masks and put their lives at risk again to save the lives of others, in this case that of New Yorkers in the Bronx.

By Ruth E. Hernández Beltrán (EFE)

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